Part 3.4, Finding the right label

Of course, during the recording part, eyes were kept open for licensing partners. Also, it was discussed whether we should self-release he album too, but it was decided to do that only if no good deal would come up. First contacts regarding the album were already back at 2011, but obviously it was too soon to do any deals at that time. Also, we were very close to a licensing deal in autumn 2013, a label had liked our “Hold you ground”-promo and wanted to do a deal with us, but in the end we decided that the offered deal was not good enough.

After declining one deal, we focused on finishing the album and for a while, things were pretty quiet. On autumn 2014, we again activated in regards of finding a licensing partner. We sent a big bunch of emails to potential labels, targeting mostly small to mid-sized labels. And one thing I’d like to mention for certain labels: bring our act to 2015 please, it’s everyone’s waste of money / resources & time to demand physical copy only of any material!!! I don’t really understand why good quality mp3 is not enough to start with… So, we skipped around 3-4 potential labels, ’cause we didn’t think we want to do a deal with a label stuck n 90’s.

This time, so replies started to come to mailbox pretty soon, but it started to look pretty bad, since most of the answers were something like “Very good album, but we don’t have money to release it”. So, that got me bit worried, ’cause obviously the material and our mix had market potential, so things were bit out of our hands. Few very good email conversation were going on and couple of labels wanted to take our album into their stores / distribute it, if we find a deal or self-release it. After that, it became quiet real fast, but it was just a calm before the storm…

At very end of 2014, almost like a present from Joulupukki ( the Finnish santa ), we got a serious licensing proposal from Underground Symphony. After digging information & the usual “due diligence” stuff, we asked them to send us their licensing proposal and to our almost a surprise, the deal was actually pretty good, compared to previous deals / proposals we had. So with a very big excitement, we then inked a licensing deal with the and set the release of “Vis Vires Infinitus” to July 2015. Also, we had started planning a digi single release to boost our licensing parter search, but that then became a boost for album sales and on 9th of March, 2015, “Never Tell” single was released.